Apple has created incredible SOC for Mac! I was amazed by the efficiency of Apple Silicon. The test was done using a base MacBook Air M1, a Xeon E3-1200, and a Raspberry Pi 4 Broadcom BCM2711 SOC. The commands sudo powermetrics -s cpu_power for Apple and sudo powertop for Linux provide an estimate of the energy usage of the various components of the computer.
Incredibly, Apple Silicon M1 stands at an absorption level of around 10-20mw with a fully loaded desktop environment. The consumption includes GPU and CPU. On the other hand, the Intel Xeon maintains at 8w, which is expected, given that it is a high-performance desktop CPU that is not very new. However, the consumption in this case is only for the CPU.
Finally, the Raspberry Pi 4, without a desktop environment but only in command-line mode with ssh access, maintains the CPU at 1.5w. The work done by Apple also explains the infinite battery life of its laptops. It’s true that the ARM architecture consumes less, and it’s also true that the production process makes a difference, but the result achieved by Cupertino is not for everyone. They are years ahead of the competition, as can be seen with Qualcomm and its SOC, which can’t keep up.